This Daffiness Bugs Me

by Scott Bieser
[email protected]

Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

          In the fallout from the Columbine High School massacre, as people either seek something to blame for this tragedy, or cynically use it to advance their own agendas, the debate begins to resemble an old Warner Brothers cartoon.
          This cartoon features Elmer Fudd in his usual role of Goofball Hunter. His prey are now both Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, each spending five slapstick-filled minutes competing to see who can maneuver Fudd into shooting the other. Bugs, being slicker, usually wins, although sometimes Daffy has his minor victories as well.
          The plot of this depends on the audience NOT asking one or two impertinent questions: 1) Why don't the rabbit and duck unite against their common enemy, and more easily evade the hunter or get rid of him altogether? and 2) Why doesn't Fudd just ignore the silly shenanigans and shoot both of them?
          In the real world, we have two camps each trying to maneuver Elmer Clinton (and his pal Foghorn Congress) into fragging the other guy. On one side the entertainment companies, and computer game companies in particular, find themselves in Elmer's crosshairs because "violent media" are supposedly desensitizing kids and training them to kill. On the other side, gun rights supporters are getting blasted for supporting the "proliferation" of guns and blocking gun control measures.
          So each camp, to avoid taking damage, points to the other guy: "Don't shoot me, shoot him!" If this were really a Warner Brothers cartoon, we could hope that Clinton and the Congress would become so hopelessly befuddled that they give up the hunt. But Kenneth Starr has already shown us that Elmer Clinton is much more clever and tenacious than Elmer Fudd.
          Most people in the entertainment business are not gun owners, and most gun owners are not in the entertainment business. But some of us are. I am a member of both the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, a computer game industry group, and Gun Owners of America, an uncompromising gun rights group. I like to create games and shoot guns. And I don't like seeing my friends and colleagues in each camp trying to make human sacrifices out of the other camp.
          The charge against media companies and the charge against guns are both based on the same wrong idea: that people have no real minds of their own, but simply react to whatever stimulus is in the current environment. Or put another way, that we shouldn't and can't expect people, especially 18-year-olds, to know right from wrong.
          Once a game company spokesman fingers guns as the problem, then he agrees that people can't be expected to make proper moral choices, such as not murdering one's associates. And therefore, the state gets a green light to regulate or prohibit anything that might seduce these foolish people into making the wrong moral choices, scary guns, seductive movies, and violent games included.
          When a gun rights spokesman points to violent video games as the problem, he agrees that people are soft, malleable vessels who can be easily twisted by entertainment into murderous monsters. Now, who would want to let such mindless creatures own guns?
          The bottom line is, if we unleash the government on guns today, they'll come after our entertainment later. And if we send the goons after "evil" entertainment, then our arguments against their taking our guns later will be laughable.
          It's time for us to stop playing Bugs' and Daffy's game. There's plenty of room in Elmer Clinton's meat freezer and no real reason he can't draw a bead on both guns and games, while we stand around like silly cartoon characters pointing fingers at one another. Instead, gamers and shooters should stand together under the banner of free will and the Bill of Rights, and send Elmer back to Little Rock empty-handed.

Scott Bieser is art director for a major computer game developer and publisher in Southern California. And he'll pay good money for used copies of L. Neil Smith's out-of-print novels.

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